I was just thinking about the fact that mapping and scripting takes less time than making graphics so I thought about the keeping the game style as simple as possible, but still reasonably pretty, to make it easier to do a lot of art...

Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

The style is called clean-cut which basically means very limited texturing, more like hinting about the material of the surface... Looks nice and is fairly simple to do. So more people are able to contribute. The key of success is a consistent style.

Ok, here is an example of a more complex style of pixel art. It requires a good knowledge about things like how light behaves and texturing. You shouldn't be a complete beginner if attempting to do this and making the art takes a lot longer.

It is not like the game will look as good as that if the take this route.

Last edited by ??? Profit! on Tue Aug 25, 2009 10:25 am; edited 1 time in total

What I think about this is that we should have the best graphics we can using the easiest way for drawing them. Of course, talking is easy, it seems hard to associate the two, but if we were able to render good textures in an easy fashion, that would be pretty cool.

We'd need an easy-to-use, open-source drawing software.

It just occured me, why don't we use Vectorial graphics?I mean, they load faster on the screen, are very easy to use and even basic textures look good on it.Also, even if two different people create graphics for the game without a reference, their works will still match (what probably wouldn't happen with pixel art) as if they were made together.

Well, that's just my idea, the decision should come from the group. This should be a pool. Profit, mind editing your post to add that option? ^^Something like:- Pixel art, simple- Pixel art, complex- Vectorial art.

I don't quite understand why vectorial art is said to be slower than bitmap (the comment doesn't make sense), but that's also a point to be considered. But I guess we could simply convert them into .jpg or .png files and import them the normal way.

I've suggested Vectorials mostly because they're easy to handle and two different vectorial images don't look too off when put together, while two different kinds of sprites look really strange together. I'm no graphic artist, though, so I probably haven't got a clue about which one is better for you to create.

Well, as long as we don't make our sprites in MS Paint, I'm cool with whatever you guys show up with.

I'd actually prefer to do vectorial art because it is pretty new for me and looks like an efficient way of making art. It might be easier to make support for different resolutions and for fullscreen because of the lossless resizing. I'll practice it a bit now

That's right. As for myself, I'll see if I can make some codes in order to render SVG on java.But it really seems that vectorial graphics are slower than bitmap images... ~.~

However, it's not hard to render the contents of a vectorial file onto a BufferedImage context once a screen size has been selected, it will just take a little while to load them, but we can get good speed independent of the screen size this way.

Of course this is bound to give me a hell lotta work again in the textures part, but if everyone agrees for this point, it's worth my time.